<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Does my mother have no empathy?',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<p>
	We were going to rent a trailer from the moving van company for twenty-four hours, but we couldn&apos;t find our trailer hitch.
	The main problem is that we have our belongings spread out across two houses still, so whenever we need something, there&apos;s a chance that it&apos;s too far away to reach.
	Our only option was to take a load to Springfield in the van (minivan, not moving van) without the added space provided by the trailer.
	On the way to Springfield, our mother seemed quite surprised that Cyrus wasn&apos;t their usual chipper self.
	Does our mother not understand that other people have feelings?
	Our mother thoroughly railed on us both yesterday, why would either of us be chipper?
	I&apos;ve learned to keep my emotions under wraps around our mother, but for Cyrus, it&apos;s all out there on their sleeve.
	Cyrus seemed lifeless and emotionally drained.
	In any sane world, why would Cyrus be any other way, given the circumstances?
</p>
<p>
	Once in the Springfield house, I felt like I was mostly standing around trying to figure out what to do.
	The goal was to move things that we were not keeping out of the garage to make space to store things that we were keeping.
	However, Cyrus and especially I already thinned down to the point where nothing in this old house belong to us.
	Everything left either belongs to our mother or is &quot;family&quot; gear; in other words, objects that my mother prefers not to think of as being exclusively their own, but that they themselves hold the exclusive power to decide whether it&apos;s being kept or not.
	Cyrus and I did our best though, and the three of us finished up our task.
</p>
<p>
	As we were heading out, I noticed a partial photograph of my father in the garbage.
	My mother had cut out themself, Vivian, and me from the image, leaving only the background and our father!
	My mother has always liked to rewrite history, claiming that things were different than they really were.
	I suppose doctoring old photographs is just an extension of that tendency.
</p>
<p>
	On our way out of town, we met up with Robert, one of my mother&apos;s friends.
	Robert had offered to give us their trailer hitch.
	The thing is, they didn&apos;t even want the trailer hitch.
	It had come on their current vehicle and the only reason it was still there was that it was held in place by a lock, not one of the usual pins.
	Robert had tried to cut the lock in the past to remove it, but hadn&apos;t succeeded.
	Today, Robert tried again to cut the lock, failed, then got their neighbour to help them out.
	Despite not wanting the thing, it was awfully nice of Robert to go through the trouble to give us the trailer hitch.
	It&apos;ll save us a lot of money in getting a new one.
</p>
<p>
	Heading back to Coos Bay, our mother talked about how Robert and their partner Heather seem to be going through a rough patch, relationship-wise.
	Our mother thinks that they don&apos;t make a good pair and that this is going to be the final straw that breaks them up.
	Heather and Robert married in Oregon, but since then, Heather&apos;s been trying to get Robert and themself moved to Nevada.
	Robert doesn&apos;t like Nevada, it&apos;s too much of a desert, while Heather doesn&apos;t like western Oregon because it isn&apos;t a desert.
	Our mother says that people should marry in the place that they want to be; after all, that&apos;s where you&apos;ll find others that want to be there as well.
	Honestly, I can see the logic in that, but is our mother really one to talk? Our mother married a man in California after promising the man that they&apos;d not try to move out of California.
	The man didn&apos;t want to leave the state.
	Later though, our mother demanded that they leave anyway, breaking their promise.
	That man, our father, says that they&apos;re happy that they were convinced to come to Oregon by our mother.
	However, that doesn&apos;t change the fact that my mother has no room to speak ill of Heather.
	At least Heather, to the best of my knowledge, made no such promise not to move.
</p>
<section id="docmod">
	<h2>Document modifications</h2>
	<p>
		On <a href="/en/weblog/2018/01-January/16.xhtml#Vivian">2018-01-16</a>, my sister, Vivian, requested that I replace all instances of her legal name in my journal with the name &quot;Vivian&quot;.
		She also asked that the name of the organisation she works for be redacted.
		This page was modified to fulfil that request.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
